


The Epics Told In Symphonies

by horatioandophelia



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Angst, Art, Depression, Drabble, Idol Worship, Internal Monologue, M/M, One Shot, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-20 14:27:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18994450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horatioandophelia/pseuds/horatioandophelia
Summary: R's perspective about life, love, art, addiction, and life in Apollo's shadow(written very similarly to Grantaire's rants in the brick)





	The Epics Told In Symphonies

I am afraid of everything; I am afraid of nothing. There is something so easy and so simultaneously agonizing to love everything so much, to feel so deeply, that I make the greatest effort of all: to feel nothing. Such is cynicism, such is “uncaring,” when I would give my soul and my life to not care.  
I am in love with the epics told in symphonies; I am in love with greasy unforgiving paints that stain my fingers and my clothes and my life; I am in love with dark and complex sins which make my dreams both beautiful and terrifying, like the downfall of an emperor, or blood on the beads of a rosary. I am in love with death; I am in love with life. I am in love with small touches and smaller hours spent next to unsuspecting innocents who nothing of the love I bear them.  
I am in love with no one; I am in love with everyone.

I am hideously ugly and hideously intelligent; I see details and patterns that others cannot: the enchanting swoop of a woman’s hair, the slightly earthen flavor of wine, the thousand different smiles that come and go on one man’s face. I myself am only a passing imp in the edifice of Time, unnoticeable and astute - not to to the flaws and faults of others, but those of myself.  
Cigarettes are a small and daily sin, an indulgence, a penance and a way of staying sane. Liquor is a similar but darker vice that makes me laugh frightfully and brings forth all the ugly things within my soul that I would rather stay hidden until all my flaws are before me in unmerciful, corrupted, rotting glory and I am so ashamed I can barely stumble to bed as the sun rises over another day. Wait just a few more hours, just a few more hours, I am still so ugly and so broken that sunlight will all but destroy me.

Sometimes I become so angry that I want to break myself in half.  
No matter how many times I have sworn to change, how many times I have promised to better myself, I come sliding back down into nothingness, where I feel like a jagged inkblot on the lovely page of everyone else’s lives. There is nothing glorious in trying to live a life to the fullest: most of the time I wind up falling to my knees, clutching another dead dream in the back of a rained-out alley.  
Dark colors do not become me; desperation does not become me; drunken tears do not become me, yet all of these things I cling to like a lifeline. I am so full of ugly, nonsensical contrasts that sometimes even I do not understand myself.  
My very existence seems fraught with turmoil.

Even though I love, in some aspect, everyone who crosses my path, be it anyone from quiet, doddering old women to small schoolchildren begging for candy, I am in love most of all with someone I will never have. He thinks me cheerfully mad, a drunkard and nothing more; I wish I could be so. For he is everything that I should be: a leader, a believer, an idealist, and the purest soul that God ever put on this Earth to live among men.  
What a fool I must be to love him!  
He is far too beautiful for anyone’s deserving, especially mine, and yet I cannot keep away. He draws me, intoxicates me, grounds me like no wine and no elegantly dying cigarette can do. I am swept up by the contrasts between us: I am the shadowed, cloudy night incarnate, while he is the day and the bright, shining sunrise. Heaven’s grace has given him the beauty of a pagan god and the innocence and idealism of a child. He thinks nothing of me, for what is a cynic, drowning in the dark, worth to a god among men? Next to him, I am nothing; next to him, I feel everything.  
He will be my death as he is my life; he is my doom as much as my salvation.

It is on the darkest days that I know myself to be truly worthless. These are the days when the blood runs down in lovely rivulets on my arms, when my eyes are ringed by shadows and my laughter is as hollow as something dead and forgotten long ago.  
These are the days when my breath is sour with liquor and my tears are ever-ready to tumble into my lap, too shameful to remain on my downturned face, and my hands can never seem to get warm.  
These are the days when my art and my voice and my thoughts are so ugly that I dare not bring them into the light. It is during these days and these black, black nights, that I curse myself for my cowardice and my weakness and my fractured, ugly soul.

It is only on days when I can find enough of myself to throw onto a canvas that I do not want to die. It is during the hours when I am blind to needs and wants and cares that I become something other than a cynic, something other than a small dark figure in a large bright city, so incongruous, so unremarkable, simply another suffering soul.  
When I am surrounded by the smells, the textures, the hunger to express my sufferings, my ecstasies, on canvas, I am no longer bound by laws of mortal men. 

On scraps of cheap paper, my thoughts make sense in figures and gestures sketched and breathed into life by hands that shake with fatigue, drugs, withdrawal, or simple grief. At the easel, I am not a coward. I am not a cynic, I am not a drunk, I am not the thousand other things that make me so broken that I am barely held together by anything at all. 

It is on the days that I refuse to bow to my own fears that I become something slightly more beautiful, something less ugly and less broken. Sometimes I feel almost whole, when gazing on a piece to which I have selfishly enchained myself: a dancer poised on an empty stage, an angel leading a glorious revolution, a pair of lovers in a wild garden.  
And when I sell these pieces of my soul to pay for rent and wine and food, I am desperately sorry to see them go. But they are a part of myself that is past; they must go, it is inevitable. And so in my weakness I run back to tobacco smoke and crystalline glass bottles of deadly liquid to soothe the ache in my broken heart, my stitched and ugly heart that loves everything and nothing, that sees all the dark and all the light and cannot choose between them. 

I am a coward; I am a cynic. I am every flaw and crack and shatteringly twisted epithet I have had aimed and hurled at me. 

But I swear that I have lived.  
I have fallen and broken nearly everything I have ever touched. I have dreamed and created and danced to the beat of strange and enchanting drums, I have loved, I have died, and I have been born again under the light of a new star, and I was not afraid. I am among the stranger things of this earth.  
Most of the time, I believe there is no hope for me left; I am a constant chaos contained in a walking corpse.  
But I am an artist; what more can I expect?

Sometimes I listen to myself when I ramble; I realized just a few days ago that half the things I say when I’m drunk are in French. Sometimes I want to pour different colors of ink all of my fingers to stain them forever, keep the art so close to my veins that I can almost taste it. Sometimes the symphonies I hear make me laugh, sometimes they make me cry. My capacity for love and loss is infinite, I live for today but not tomorrow. 

I am the biggest coward I know. I am appallingly inadequate.

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever appreciate just how truly ugly I am.   
Who am I that I ever dared to love you? Who am I that I ever dared to whisper your name in the night? Who am I that I ever dared to dream of you? Who am I that I ever dared to cry with your name on my lips?`


End file.
